Safire on "Rogue State"

[Fred Shapiro]

In tomorrow's "On Language" column in the New York Times, William Safire
writes about the term "rogue state":  "The earliest use I can find of this
phrase was in a 1983 Wall Street Journal story noting that smokestack
industries have 'won Ohio a largely deserved reputation as a _rogue state_
on the environment.'  Two years later, the columnist William Pfaff first
applied it in its current sense..."

In fact, a Nexis search retrieves a 29 Nov. 1982 Newsweek article by
Henry Kissinger in which Kissinger refers to "the rogue state of Libya."
A more general sense occurs in a 1977 article by Jethro K. Lieberman in
Philosophy and Public Affairs (volume 7, page 63, found with a JSTOR
search):  "In attempting to honor its commitments, the state will discover
it necessary to adopt rules for interpreting the vague language in the
contract ... And notice that these are not rules that only a rogue state
will adopt."


Fred R. Shapiro                             Coeditor (with Jane Garry)
Associate Librarian for Public Services     TRIAL AND ERROR: AN OXFORD
  and Lecturer in Legal Research            ANTHOLOGY OF LEGAL STORIES
Yale Law School                             Oxford University Press, 1998
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               ISBN 0-19-509547-2